Gentoo on Pine64 - ARM64 Gentoo

Ivan The Viking · Posted: Tue Dec 20, 2016 2:19 am Post subject: Gentoo on Pine64 - ARM64 Gentoo

Hey All,

I've had a Pine64+ 2GB since about July last year.
I ran Ubuntu on it since day 1 without issue, but, being a Gentoo guy years ago, couldn't stay away from this distro.
Someone was kind enough to bootstrap Gentoo using the Ubuntu image, something I had stumbled upon on the Pine64 forums.
I used this image to fire up my Pine64 on gentoo in October, and now use it as a whole house server.

It's running Samba, ZFS, UniversalMediaServer, rtorrent, and lighttpd without issue. It's a nice low power powerhouse.
I've attached a whole slew of 4TB USB hard drives to it in a Raid 6 ZFS, and use a 16GB SD card to boot.

So it would not get lost in the ages, I made a .torrent of the bootable image someone had made for it.
The U-Boot is not mainline, neither is the kernel, both are custom for the Pine64 with DRM support for X.
I never have run X on this beast, nor have I used the sound output, but I'm sure they work with this kernel.

Grab it here if you'd like, from that Pine64 which is also seeding that torrent.
http://ivntheviking.bounceme.net/gentoo-pine64-20160804.img.gz.torrent

sshd and dhcpcd run by default.
The default login is gentoo:gentoo
Root pwd is also gentoo

uname -a gives this:

irenicus09 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Jun 2013 Posts: 118

Hmm interesting. I've been looking at that board for a while now, has very interesting specs. How is the gpu btw...can it play 1080p video?

If so I will consider buying it.

Also I'm curious about zfs, I've heard a lot of great things about the file system especially on BSD's. I've realized that it has been ported to Linux, not sure how stable it is or if it has the same level of features as the original zfs. If you could share your experience about zfs on Linux that would be great, and also the reason which led you to choose zfs over Linux filesystems like ext4, btrfs, etc.

I know that is a lot of question to ask, sorry about that but I'm just curious about this.

Thanks for your time

Ivan The Viking · Posted: Tue Dec 20, 2016 10:54 am Post subject:

I do confirm the board plays 1080p video - I have a second one hooked up to my TV running an android build and Kodi to play all my media.
I didn't ever try to use Gentoo that way, too much work for little benefit. The android builds available for it are pretty good. This replaced the ouya I used to use for that.

Why ZFS? It's the mother of all file systems - raid with hot swapping, the ability to grow the pool at any time, bulletproof Solaris software really.
I never was a big fan of the Linux software RAID with ext4 on it. My / partition is still ext4 fwiw since ZFS on boot is a PITA.

Read up on it http://zfsonlinux.org/ - it's pretty full featured. Again, I did a raid 6 with 10 drives, 36 TB of usable space using 5400 rpm drives.
Total power draw for those with the pine64 at full tilt is about 45 watts according to my UPS.

irenicus09 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Jun 2013 Posts: 118

Hmm zfs has some interesting features, definitely makes sense with so many hard drives you have

I hope to try zfs at some point but I sort of get intimidated by the different commands. Not sure how big is the learning curve

Ivan The Viking · Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2017 5:30 pm Post subject:

I found the original thread on the Pine64 forums where this is from if people are looking for the original source.

http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=1937&highlight=gentoo

-Shawn